Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [41]
No matter. The Game Boy sold out in Japan upon its launch in April 1989, and sold out in America four months later. (Toys “R” Us offered to be the exclusive home of the Game Boy: Arakawa was smart enough to say no.) Millions upon millions of each of the four launch games were sold. President Bush was photographed using one. It was huge in Europe, much bigger than the NES. A Russian cosmonaut took one into space—to play Tetris, of course. Super Mario Land alone sold 18.4 million copies over its lifetime. It more than made up for no NES Mario game released in 1989. The Game Boy would go on to sell a flabbergasting 118 million units. There are more Game Boys in the world than people in Mexico. You could tile half the states in New England with Game Boys. Nintendo, it seemed, could do no wrong. The prestigious Japan Economic Journal that year named Nintendo the best company in Japan, besting Toyota.
Nintendo was so confident, it even closed the book on one of its first cash cows, the Game & Watch. The final game, Mario the Juggler, was Nintendo in a nutshell. Its simple premise was that Mario had to keep juggling. It was, in fact, a redesigned version of the original Game & Watch game Ball, from ten years earlier. Simple, inexpensive to make, proven popularity, a certain Italian mascot: all of the Big N’s grace notes. Long-running TV shows have aired final episodes that weren’t as contemplative, respectful, or tributary. One wonders if Gunpei Yokoi wanted to include Mario bowing a tearful farewell as an LCD curtain fell.
The Game Boy had loads of room for improvement. Any system with a color screen was a better game-playing machine. Atari’s Lynx and Sega’s Game Gear both claimed that: both used backlights, too. Their games were graphically superior to regular NES games, let alone Game Boy’s four flavors of creamed spinach. But—as Yokoi knew they must—these handhelds gobbled up batteries at a shocking rate, six every four hours. A fraction of the Game Boy shelf space was allotted to whatever high-price, high-quality, high-weight competitor was out there. They never caught on, despite years of marketing and many solid games.
Gamers already had a Game Boy by then. They already equated portable consoles with puzzles, low-impact gameplay, and inexpensiveness. Sega, Atari, and TurboGrafix had color screens, but did they have a Yokoi? Did they have a Miyamoto? If not, too bad. Every new all-green Game Boy title made competitors green—with envy.
10 – MARIO’S DRIFT
SEGA, THE GENESIS, AND A VERY FAST HEDGEHOG
Every issue of Nintendo Power contained a Howard and Nester comic strip. Howard was the clueless do-gooder, and Nester the wild child. They’d jump into game worlds (whatever was on the cover the previous month) and pass on a game tip. Nester looked like a skate punk waiting for puberty. Howard was a tall gangly redhead in a bowtie—the red hair tying into the Richie Cunningham/Jimmy Olson/Archie Andrews trifecta of unthreatening all-American rubes.
Nester was fictional, hence his name, the NES-ster. Howard, though, was based on Howard Phillips, one of the American branch’s first employees. (And yes, there was a Howdy Doody quality to him.) Phillips had been the first person to think that Donkey Kong was a better game than Radar Scope. He was one of the original six who had converted the two thousand units shipped over from Jersey. During the Universal lawsuit, he flew to New York to demonstrate Donkey Kong in court. A few years later, he moved to the New York area and spent months setting up World of Nintendo displays. He helped choose which games from the hundreds